Hello,

I know that IIS 6 WebDAV doesn't support ampersands (amongst other special characters) in filenames.

I've also read here that IIS seems to intercept ampersands before they can be processed by Document Exchange.

To that end, having a client making significant use of ampersands in filenames, is there any update on the status of getting this to work?

The closest I've come is through Super Flexible File Synchronizer which authenticates, interacts with DMX, and allows special character replacement... but only on colons in filenames.

(I've corresponded briefly with the author of SFFS, who seems very responsive, but don't know if the feature will surface in the product.)

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

(I've tried WebDrive, and it's promising, but I'm also looking for alternatives.)

Now that I've managed to sort out that the WebDAV implementation in Windows XP is shaky (though seemingly better in Vista/7), I'd just like to finish off this last hiccup.

Many thanks!

Matthew (Floating-Point Communications)

Hello Peter!

Thanks for the quick reply!

Just trying to isolate what I'm fighting here.

(It sounds like I've got a solution on the way. Tobias Giesen of Super Flexible File Synchronizer is looking at putting something together to handle ampersands (and maybe more)... which seem to be a significant problem, though it likely extends to other special characters (no luck with '+' either).)

My original thoughts pertaining to DMX come from your reply to Lance Prager in 'Webdav peculiarities' from 10/17/2007...

About the special characters this is how far I've got. The ' and [ I've managed to track and solve. However, the % and & elude me for now. The WebDAV server is not even being hit when you try to push a file with that in the name. It's like IIS stops the request before it gets to my code. I'm not aware of any solutions to this. Just as a sanity check, I decided to try it with Sharepoint. Guess what, it also chokes on the % and &. Maybe our server is not that bad at all ;-)

I get that DMX is out of the loop on handling things; however, here's what I see when using cadaver (seemed the lightest implementation to test with)...

NOTE: I've hacked the output a bit to generalize it, but short of the "Authentication required..." line it should accurately represent the scenario...

X:\>cadaver http://mydmxtest.com/dmxdav.axd/Projects
Authentication required for 0@DMX - Test on server `mydmxtest.com':
Username: admin
Password:
dav:/dmxdav.axd/Projects/> ls
Listing collection `/dmxdav.axd/Projects/': succeeded.
Coll:   Folder 2                               0  Aug 21 16:56
Coll:   Folder 2b                              0  Aug 24 10:22
Coll:   Folder 2c                              0  Aug 24 14:08
dav:/dmxdav.axd/Projects/> mput *.txt
[Matching... 2 matches.]
Uploading peanut-butter^jelly.txt to `/dmxdav.axd/Projects/peanut-butter%5ejelly.txt': succeeded.
Uploading Peanut butter & Jelly.txt to `/dmxdav.axd/Projects/Peanut%20butter%20%26%20Jelly.txt':
Progress: [=============================>] 100.0% of 17 bytes failed:
400 Bad Request
dav:/dmxdav.axd/Projects/> quit
Connection to `mydmxtest.com' closed.

It looks like cadaver (and I suspect most of the other tools I've used) is encoding the ampersand, but I'm getting a '400 Bad Request'.

That's IIS, isn't it?

I don't figure there's a whole lot you can do about it, but on the off chance that you see a solution, I'd be glad for your input.

Each piece seems to be doing reasonable things, but put together, they're not working.

Just trying to find a reliable solution for deployment.

Best regards,

Matthew (Floating-Point Communications)

Just a quick update that I've heard from Tobias Giesen at Super Flexible File Synchronizer and he has implemented the character translation function as of version 4.63.

Initial testing works well!

It's a custom translation, so you can map out any offending characters to something more palatable to WebDAV.

(For back and forth synchronization it's my understanding you will want to make sure the reverse translation is also unique or you might get mangled filenames.  Since this isn't a (large) factor for me, it's a good fit.)

Advanced mode also let's you get at all the settings you need.

Remember to set the pathing to include the leading '/' so that /dmxdav.axd/ is properly resolved.

I think SFFS makes a great complement to DMX!

Thanks Peter!

The article on Fiddler looks very helpful.

Things seem to be well in hand now.

Matthew (Floating-Point Communications)